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Why We'll Never Meet Aliens
iggychaos writes "The idea that aliens will come visit us is fundamentally flawed. Paul Tyma ponders the technology that would be required for such an event and examines how evolution of that technology would preclude any reason to actually make the trip. He writes, 'Twenty years ago if I asked you how many feet were in a mile (and you didn't know) you could go to a library and look it up. Ten years ago, you could go to a computer and google it. Today, you can literally ask your phone. It's not a stretch at all with the advent of wearable computing that coming soon - I can ask you that question and you'll instantly answer. ... How would you change if you had instant brain-level access to all information. How would you change if you were twice as smart as you are now. How about ten times as smart? (Don't answer, truth is, you're not smart enough to know). Now, let's leap ahead and think about what that looks like in 100 years. Or 1000. Or whenever it is you'll think we'd have the technology to travel to another solar system. We'd be a scant remnant of what a human looks like today. ... The question of why aliens might 'want to come here' is probably fundamentally flawed because we are forming that question from our current (tiny) viewpoint. The word 'want' might not apply at all to someone 1000 times smarter than us."
I mean seriously, If i wanted this I would talk to my friend on mushrooms. This is not new in any sense of the word.
"We have no idea how supertechnologically enhanced superscientific aliens would think. THEREFORE, we can be sure that we'll never meet any aliens. Because we don't understand anything of their thought processes. So we can say with certainty they won't find it logical to make the trip."
We aliens are spending tons of money to find really stupid (no intelligence) bacteria on Mars. Why wouldn't some super smart aliens want to find us?
Skimmed TFA - not worth more of my time.
Going back down to that STEM article ..
1 - Curiosity - Maybe they can predict us, but what are untested predictions worth. Think Doc Smith's Arisians and their "Visualization of the Cosmic All." They still needed Samms' lens on-site to test their prediction.
2 - Charity - Arguably we could certainly use some assistance.
3 - Boredom - When you've solved that many problems, and when you've run out of "Gilligan's Isolated Stellar Cluster" reruns, you need something to do.
Really, we have no idea how rare the Earth is - or isn't, and that would affect the likelihood of being investigated by a more advanced type of life. We've been finding planets in the Goldilocks belt, and some of those are nearly Earth-sized. But at the same time we're learning more about how critical Jupiter and the Moon are to our development, so OUR requirements were actually quite complex, not that that needs to be universal.
But the rarer the circumstances for intelligent life to develop, the more likely it gets that we will be investigated. That assumes that that puts us in the bucket of "interesting things", and that that bucket is smaller than it would be if the galaxy were teeming with life.
I do have to agree with the article's assertion and reasons that there won't be an invasion force. If there were to be any hostile actions by aliens, it would almost have to be xenophobic fear - get us before we get the technology to get them. If that were the case, we'd never see an invasion force - comets and asteroids are much simpler, easier, cheaper, less risky, and at least as effective.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
And we don't need ANY arguments about what such beings would be like in order to understand that there is nothing unique here to want. The Solar System is composed of approximately 99.95% hydrogen and helium. This is basically the same as the composition of the rest of the Universe. While some elements may be slightly more common or concentrated in slightly more convenient forms in one place than another there simply isn't anything particularly unique in one star system that isn't present in another.
Furthermore look at the energetics of interstellar space travel. "Accelerating one ton to one-tenth of the speed of light requires at least 450 PJ or 4.5 ×10^17 J or 125 billion kWh, without factoring in efficiency of the propulsion mechanism. This energy has to be either generated on-board from stored fuel, harvested from the interstellar medium, or projected over immense distances." -- Wikipedia. In 2008 the world used roughly 474×10^18 J, which means the entire power output of the human race for a year would suffice to accelerate one starship of 40 tons to 0.1C, roughly. This is about the weight of the 'J' class Apollo Lunar mission payload (LEM, CM, SM, etc). Clearly even the most limited interstellar travel would have an energy cost that is frankly hard to imagine.
So, considering the enormous cost and the high degree of technology required to traverse interstellar space, why bother? Certainly it can never be economical. The energy costs quoted above indicate that even the most expensive conceivable processes for making things would be cheaper (IE using solar power to perform nuclear reactions to transmute one element into whatever other ones you need and then make whatever you want out of it) than traveling to where you can find something.
Clearly a civilization could in principle literally consume all matter in its vicinity. It is hard to imagine how this would lead to expansion for economic reasons though, there'd never be any hope of getting a return on your investment.
Obviously someone can always invent some new hypothesis as to why, for reasons of alien psychology, aliens would want to travel, but nobody knows squat about alien psychology, so there's really no point in debating it. The very fact that such an undertaking would be VAST in scope, significant even for a Kardeshev level 2 civilization indicates it wouldn't be carried out on some whim, and it seems unlikely that a civilization which spent its energy so profligately on whims would survive long.
I know it isn't a real popular opinion to hold, but everything I see indicates that interstellar distances are pretty close to uncrossable for physical beings like humans. Frankly I think that is the plain answer to the whole Fermi Paradox that people just don't really want to come to grips with. The gulfs between the stars are so wide that nobody crosses them, EVER.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
"Well sir, we've pretty much exhausted the available resources around this star, and worse, the star's going to go nova soon."
"The Kuiper belt?"
"Mined out fifty thousand years ago."
"The Oort cloud?"
"Slim pickings. At the current rate, we've got enough for another century at the outside."
"Dammit, you've got to give me something!"
"Well, there *are* other stars..."
"Don't be ridiculous, it takes resources to get there."
Humans taste about the same as pigs. I wouldn't call that the finest delicacy.
Bacon comes from pigs. Pigs are fucking delicious.